(’Twas enough to break my heart)
All the statues made of lead and pictures O!”[27]
The eighteenth century must have been busy in the “manufacture” of these garden figures and ornaments, some of the gardens mentioned have as many as twenty to thirty pieces still. A great number was doubtless absorbed in the London public gardens and the villas up the Thames. In old Vauxhall was a statue of Milton by Roubilliac, but it is difficult to attribute many specimens to individuals. The negro we saw was sold by Mr. John Cheere in St. Martin’s Lane, but likely enough the model was a part of the stock of Van Nost, as also the fine vases at Hampton Court. Many of these statues were destroyed to suit the “purer taste” of this century, and a great number were exported during the American War to become bullets, because at that time as “works of art” the lead escaped the Customs. A large number have been accidentally crushed by the fall of a tree or otherwise destroyed, and many not adequately supported have flattened down out of shape.
There was a large display à la Louis Quatorze, of lead casting in the gorgeous gardens of Versailles; where in the fountains, groups of statues, and vases, the greatest sculptors of the time worked indifferently in marble, bronze, or plomb doré. François Girardon was one of these. Born in 1628, at Troyes, he lived to the year 1715, achieving a reputation that placed him amongst the foremost of French artists of that time.
The immense structure entirely of lead known as the Fountain of the Pyramid is his work. From a basin in which sport three man-sized tritons rises a pedestal, with a circular basin much enriched by gadroons, set on three classic zoomorphous legs; and above it three other like basins of diminishing size, each supported from the one below around the rim; by baby tritons for the lowest, the next with dolphins, and the last with lobsters. In the last basin is a vase. The whole is a composition showing great refinement of scholarship, recalling in general form the great pine cone of bronze in the Vatican gardens, once the fountain in the atrium of old St. Peter’s. It is exquisitely drawn and engraved by Rouyer et Darcel[28] together with two vases also of lead from the Basin of Neptune.
Other groups, some of colossal proportions—“France Victorious,” “The Four Seasons,” and so on—were the work of Thomas Renaudin of Moulins, J. B. Tubi from Rome, Pierre Mazaline and Gaspard de Marcu; their individual works, with illustrations, may be distinguished in the volume of engraved statues of the Versailles gardens by S. Thomassin published in Paris 1694.
Versailles certainly set the fashion, which we followed and which influenced the gardens of the most of Europe. In Russia a Swiss gardener arranged a labyrinth at the summer palace of Peter the Great with animal groups from Æsop in gilt lead forming fountains. Beckford, writing from Lisbon in 1789, describes a garden at Bemfica “which eclipses our Clapham and Islington villas in all the attractions of leaden statues, Chinese temples, serpentine rivers, and dusty hermitages.”
§ XV. OF LEAD FOUNTAINS.
None of the old English gardens were complete without a fountain, and no fountain was complete without a figure. Bacon says—“For fountains ... the ornaments of images, gilt or of marble, which are in use do well.”